Iron Sunrise

INTERLUDE 1

In a stately home by the banks of a dried-up river on a world with two small moons, a woman with sea-green eyes and crew-cut black hair sat behind a desk, reading reports. The house was enormous and ancient, walls of stone supported by ancient oak timber beams, and the French windows were thrown wide open to admit a breeze from the terrace before the house. The woman, engrossed in her reading, didn’t notice the breeze or even the smell of rose blossom wafting in on it. She was too busy paging through memoranda on her tablet, signing warrants, changing lives.

The door made a throat-clearing sound. “Ma’am, you have a visitor.”

“Who is it, Frank?” She glanced at the brass terminal plaque that had been hacked into the woodwork by an overenthusiastic former resident.

“S. Frazier Bayreuth. He says he has some sort of personal report for you.”

“Personal,” she muttered. “All right. Show him in.” She pushed her chair back, brushing imaginary lint from the shoulder of her tunic, and thumbed her tablet to a security-conscious screen saver.

The door clicked, and she rose as it opened. Holding out a hand: “Frazier.”

“Ma’am.” There was no click of heels — he wore no boots — but he bowed stiffly, from the neck.

“Sit down, sit down. You’ve been spending too much time in the New Republic.”

S. Frazier Bayreuth sank into the indicated chair, opposite her desk, and nodded wearily. “They rub off on you.”

“Hah.” It came out as a grim cough. “How are the compatibility metrics looking?

“Better than they were a year ago, better than anybody dared hope, but they won’t be mature enough for integration for a long time yet. Reactionary buffoons, if you ask me. But that’s not why I’m here. Um. May I ask how busy you are?”

The woman behind the desk stared at him, head slightly askew. “I can give you half an hour right now,” she said slowly. “If this is urgent.”

Bayreuth’s cheek twitched. A wiry, brown-haired man who looked as if he was made of dried leather, he wore blue-gray seamless fatigues; battle dress in neutral, chromatophores and impact diffusers switched off, as if he’d come straight from a police action, only pausing to remove his armor and equipment webbing. “It’s urgent all right.” He glanced at the open window. “Are we clear?”

She nodded. “Nobody who overhears us will understand anything,” she said, unsmiling, and he shivered slightly. In a ubiquitous surveillance society, any such bare-faced assertion of privacy clearly carried certain implications.

“All right, then. It’s about the Environmental Service cleanup report on Moscow.”

“The cleanup.” She gritted her teeth. “What is it this time?”

“Arbeiter Neurath begs to report that he has identified auditable anomalies in the immigration trace left by the scram team as they cleaned up and departed. On at least three occasions over the three years leading up to the Zero Incident and the five years since then, personnel working in the Environmental Operations Team under U. Vannevar Scott failed to behave consistently in accordance with best practice guidelines for exfiltrating feral territory. That, in itself, I would not need to bring to your attention, my lady. The guilty parties have been reprocessed and their errors added to the documentation corpus pour en-courager les autres. He cleared his throat. “But…”

The woman stared at him, her expression relaxed: Bayreuth tensed. When U. Portia Hoechst looked most relaxed she was at her most dangerous — if not to him, then to someone else, some designated enemy of the mission, roadkill on the highway to destiny. She might be thirty, or ninety — it was hard to tell with ReMastered, before the sudden unraveling of the genome that brought their long lives to an abrupt but peaceful close — but if asked to gamble Bayreuth would have placed his money at the higher end of the scale. Peaceful eyes, relaxed eyes, eyes that had seen too many horrors to tense and flicker at a death warrant.

“Continue,” she said in a neutral tone of voice.

“Neurath took it upon herself to examine the detailed findings of U. Scott’s team. She discovered further anomalies and brought them to my attention. I confirmed her observations and realized the issue must be escalated. In addition to the breakdown of operational discipline in the Moscow away team, there is some evidence that Scott has been, ah, relocating skeletons from the family closet into the oubliette, if you follow me.”

“You have evidence.”

“Indeed.” Bayreuth suppressed an urge to shuffle. Hoechst made him nervous; she was far from the worst mistress he’d served — quite the contrary — but he’d never yet seen her smile. He had a horrible feeling that he was about to, and the consequences made him increasingly uneasy. Her dislike of U. Vannevar Scott needed no explanation — they were of different clades, and in no way compatible other than their service to the ultimate — but it was to be devoutly hoped that none of it rubbed off on him. The wars of the bosses at overstaffsupervisor level and above were best avoided if you wanted to keep your head, much less aspire to those heights yourself one day.

“Disclose it.”

Bayreuth took a deep breath. You can’t back out now. “A major weak link has come to light. It turns out that Scott’s team established an MO by which all traffic to and from Moscow went through a single choke point. The theory was that in event of a leak, only the one location would require sanitizing. Leaving aside the question of backup routing and fail-over capacity, this means that the immigration desk at this one location held a complete audit trail of all our agents’ movements in and out of the system.”

U. Portia Hoechst frowned very slightly. “I do not follow your argument. Surely this would have been destroyed by the Zero Incident … ?”

Bayreuth shook his head slowly and watched her eyes widen. “The bottleneck they picked was an isolated fuel dump and immigration post about a parsec from Moscow. It was evacuated some time ago, before the shock wave hit. U. Scott sent a proxy squad to tidy up any loose ends on the station, trash the immigration records, liquidate any witnesses, that sort of thing. Doubtless if it had worked properly it would have been an elegant and sufficient solution to the problem, but it would appear that a number of unexplained incidents occurred during the evacuation. Such as his written instructions to the agent on-site going missing, such as the failure to return all copies of the backup dumps from the sealed immigration desk, and possibly more. There is some question over a classified log of the experimental protocols that were then in progress, which appears to have been misplaced during the evacuation. The agent sent dogs, boss. State security dogs borrowed from the Dresdener Foreign Office. He seemed to think that sending a proper sterilization team to do the job by the book was unnecessary. All swept under the rug, of course, the evidence securely encrypted — that’s why it’s taken so long to come to light.”

“Oh dear.” Hoechst grinned at him. “Is that all?” she asked warmly, and Bayreuth shivered. From being cold as ice, suddenly Hoechst had warmed to him. “And he failed to report this?”

Bayreuth nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak right then.

“And your channel into Scott’s department…” She raised an eyebrow.

“The channel is a very personal friend of Otto Neurath,” he emphasized. “However you decide to act on this information, I would ask you to behave leniently in her case. I believe Otto shows a lot of potential for intelligent action in support of his superior’s goals, and an indelicate response to his special friend might, ah, compromise his future utility. Parenthetically speaking.”

“Oh, Georg. What kind of monster do you take me for?” The terrible smile disappeared. “I’m not stupid, you know. Or bloodthirsty. At least, not needlessly.” She snorted. “Otto can keep his toy, once her loyalties have been retargeted on our team. I won’t break her for him.” Bayreuth nodded, relieved. Her restraint, for which he could claim responsibility, would only serve to bind Otto tighter to his rising faction. “As for you—” the terrifying grin was back — “how would you like to open discussions with Scott’s department, about our forthcoming merger?”

“Me?” He blinked, shocked.

“Yes, you.” She nodded. “I’ve been thinking you deserved the added opportunities that come with an elevated degree of responsibility for some time now, Georg. What was that phrase? A lot of potential for intelligent action in support of his superior’s goals, I think you said.”

“Why, I’m deeply grateful, but—”

“Don’t be. Not yet.” She gestured out through the window, at the terrace of rosebushes and the garden beyond the ha-ha, the walls and trees and the avenue leading uphill to the stately home. “If what you’re telling me is correct, we have a serious leak to fix. And I think I may need to fix it on-site. I’ve been weaving destinies from behind a desk for too long, Georg. Scott’s mistake is typical of what happens when you stay out of the field and lose touch with reality.”

“Are you going to travel in person, then? What about your estates and committees—”

“They’ll look after themselves. They’d better — they’ll know I’ll be back.” Another smile, this time almost coy; if he hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn she was flirting with him. “But seriously. I can combine the trip with a tour of the new candidates, consolidate my control over Scott’s puppets in the field, and get back in touch with what it’s really about. The great program, Georg. Fancy that!” She tapped her tablet. “Get me a full briefing. Then I’ll arrange a session with Overdepartmentsecretary Blumlein, and obtain permission before issuing the formal denunciation by way of the Committee of Inquiry. After which we’ll discuss how you’re going to mind the shop for me while I’m gone.”

He caught her eye. “Me? The whole thing?”

She didn’t blink. “Did you have any other plans for tonight? No? Good, then I assume I can safely invite you to dine with me. We have a lot of things to discuss, Georg. Including how to ensure that you don’t disappoint me the way U. Scott has…”

The action went down hard and fast, once Hoechst had drawn certain facts to the elevated attention of Overdepartmentsecretary Blumlein. Blumlein had stared at her with those icy blue eyes, set just too close together: “Do it,” he’d said, and that was all. Leaving her enough rope to hang herself with if it turned out she was wrong and U. Vannevar Scott’s Subdepartment of External Environmental Control was, in fact, clean.

Walking in through the smashed glass doors of the office building in Samara, Hoechst nodded and smiled at the troops holding the front desk. Show the flag, as her creche-leader Fergus had exhorted her. One or two walking wounded waited stoically for the medevac truck to show up. A pile of pithed and drained bodies lay stacked like cordwood on the polished granite tiles at one side of the foyer, leaking blood from their ears and eyes, their minds already taken by the Propagators. Hoechst ignored them, concentrated on shaking hands and exchanging congratulations with her staff. First things first. Blood on the soles of her boots. She’d get to Scott in due course: Damn him for forcing me to this!

Of course, Scott’s headquarters wasn’t the only target of the action. Nodes had gone down all over the planetary net, branch offices off-lined and isolated during the mop-up. Out in the country, Peace Enforcement troops had punched in the doors of his harem, taken the puppets by the brain stem and turned them in for processing — those that weren’t put down immediately as a poor cost/benefit risk for reclamation. It was all part and parcel of the messy business of taking down a ranking ubermensch who had been accused of malfeasance, and Hoechst hated him for it, hated him for forcing her to publicly expose a ReMastered who was less than adequate at his assigned role. But she had no real alternative. A failure to act right then might only encourage him, or worse, expose her own people to accusations of inadequacy; and in the long run it risked undermining the destiny of the people.

Troops in cream-and-beige office camouflage wedged fire and blast doors open for her as she walked through the administrative castle toward the executive service core. Her bodyguards kept pace with her, anonymous behind their masks. Staff officers followed in their wake, apprehensive and eager to serve her. There were few signs of damage, and little violence, for U. Scott’s castle had been taken by stealth in the first instance. A scheduled movement of internal security troops had been replaced by Hoechst’s own storm groups, welcomed with open arms by slack defenders who never suspected that their death warrant had been ordered by the planetary overdepartmentsecretary with a curt two-word phrase.

At the core of the building stood a secure zone, doors locked open by a treacherous override. Hoechst climbed the staircase, her mood bleak. At the top, a mezzanine floor looked out across Scott’s control hub. He was one of those who seemed to thrive on oversight, she noted, as if he couldn’t trust anything that happened outside the reach of his own senses. The doorway onto the mezzanine was splattered with drying clots of blood, brown and sharp-smelling beneath the emergency lights. Her guards waited at either corner. In the middle of the floor a curious triumvirate waited for her. In the big chair, U. Vannevar Scott himself, pithed and locked down, his limbs limp and his face an accusatory mask. Behind it, to either side, stood S. Frazier Bayreuth and another person, a woman in the robe and veil of the Propagators’ Order.

“Vannevar, my dear. A shame we had to run into each other again under such distressing circumstances.” Hoechst smiled at the man in the chair. His eyes tracked her slowly, barely able to move. “And yourself, Bayreuth. And to whom else do I have the pleasure?”

The strange woman inclined her head: “U. Doranna Mengele, your excellency. Here by order of the overdepartmentsecretary to pay witness to the proceedings and ensure that all is conducted in accordance with the best practices and customs of the enlightenment.”

The body in the chair seemed to be agitated. Hoechst leaned close: “You should relax, Van. Struggling won’t help. Those nerves won’t grow back, you know.” It was necessary for her image; inside, something was screaming, You stupid unplanned bastard! What in the dead god’s name did you think you were doing? “We were given a warrant and we have executed it.”

She glanced at Bayreuth. “Do you have an activation key?”

He turned and beckoned a guard over. “Switch this one back on for the supervisor,” he said tersely. The Propagator cocked her head to one side and watched, silently. Hoechst tried not to pay any attention to her. There was no avoiding it. With a Propagator to witness everything, spooling the uploaded sensory take straight into the distributed network of her order, any attempt at dissembling — or mercy — would be exposed instantly.

The guard touched his wand to the back of U. Scott’s neck, and some expression returned to the man’s face. A finger twitched. He slurred something, fighting for control: “Portia. How could you?”

“Certain facts were drawn to my attention,” she said drily, half-noticing the way Bayreuth had turned pale behind the chair. Facts I could not ignore once they were on the record, she added to herself, expanding the eulogy. “Sloppy procedures. Failure to abide by best practice and custom. Potential treason.”

He closed his eyes. “I would never commit treason.”

“Not through commission,” she said, then damned herself for her weakness in conceding even that much in front of the Propagator’s eyecams. “Nevertheless. A risk of exposure was noted — and more importantly, swept under the rug.” She leaned over him, rested a fine-boned hand on one immobile shoulder. “We couldn’t ignore that,” she said quietly.

“I was in the process of cleaning up.” He sounded infinitely tired already; the upload bush would have digested his cerebellum, already be eating away at his thalamus, preserving him for posterity and the glory of the unborn god. Without the activator he’d soon be dead, not simply immobilized. Although he’d die soon enough, when the Propagator took his mind. “Didn’t you know, Portia? I thought, you … you…”

“Booster.” She snapped her fingers, fuming angrily. Don’t ghost out on me now! His shoulder felt like a joint of uncooked meat, solid and immobile. There was a nasty stench in the air — if he’d lost bowel control already, that meant he was farther along than she’d wanted. “Witness for the Propagation, I request access to this one’s lineage. While the instance vector has proven unreliable, I believe with suitable guidance the phenotype may prove stable and effective.”

Bayreuth was blinking at her in surprise. The Propagator nodded. “Your request has been received,” she said distantly. “A reproductive license is under consideration. Or were you thinking of a clone?”

“No, recombination only.” Hoechst leaned closer, staring into U. Vannevar Scott’s eyes, remembering earlier days, more innocent, both of them interns on the staff of an ubermensch — stolen nights, sleepless days, the guilt-free pleasure before responsibility became a curse. Politics. What, thirty years? Thirty-seven years? She could barely remember his body; some lovers were like that. Well, others you remembered for life. Scott … Scott was history, in more than one way. “It will be something to recall him by.”

“Your request will be considered by the Race Genome Improvement Committee,” said the Propagator, placidly straightening her wimple. “Is there anything else?”

“Termination witness.” She kept her hand on his shoulder while the guard administered the coup, switching the tree into uncontrolled dendritic mapping. His sightless eyes closed; presently a pale fluid began to leak from the back of his skull. The touch of dead meat; once she’d hated that … now it just left her feeling glad it wasn’t her turn. She smoothed his hair down, straightened up, and caught Georg Bayreuth’s eye. “Have this taken away for recycling.” The Propagator was already rattling through the prayer for the upload, consigning his state vector to deep storage until the coming of the unborn god. “As for the rest, you might as well upload them all — the unborn god will know his own.” She sighed. “Now. Have we found where he kept his master list of puppets?”

Well, Portia. That brings me to the next question. How is your pet project going?”

Hoechst leaned back in the overstuffed velvet-lined recliner, and stared at the gold leaf intaglio on the ceiling. She took her time answering: it was all a little overpowering. Truth be told, she was unused to having the confidence of the Overdepartmentsecretariat, and U. Blumlein’s avuncular tone put her on a defensive edge. It reminded her of one of her teachers, from the hazy years back in the creche, a fellow whose temperament alternated between confiding warmth and screaming tantrums — contrived, she later discovered while reading the creche’s policy mandate, to teach the youngsters the benefits of close-lipped circumspection. She’d been a good pupil, perhaps too good, and it was unnerving to find that the kindly professor’s object lesson in pain had such direct applicability to the upper reaches of the clade. It just went to show that that which does not kill us makes us stronger was more than just an empty platitude.

“I asked a question,” her superior reminded her.

“I believe I have the basic issues under control,” she said confidently, raising her glass and taking a cautious sip of almond liqueur to cover her moment of hesitation.

“The basic issues,” Blumlein echoed, and smiled. He held out his glass and a moppet hastened to refill it. Hoechst shuffled slightly in her chair and ran a finger under the shoulder of her gown. She smiled back at him, although she was anything but relaxed.

An invitation into her superior’s parlor for an evening’s entertainment was normally public recognition, a sign of favored status within the clade. But a private invitation, to dinner for two, was something else again. The only people who’d see her were their bodyguards, private secretaries, and the service moppets, all of whom — apart from the secretaries — were disposables who counted as nothing in the sparse social networks of the ReMastered. What could he have in mind? Special orders? It certainly wasn’t a seduction attempt — his tastes lay notoriously in other directions — and she couldn’t see herself being important enough to cultivate for other reasons. One thing every ReMastered acquired early was a sensitive nose for relative status, and this discreet assignation simply didn’t make sense from any angle she could think of. Unless he had, for some inexplicable reason, decided to assess her for the role of his public partner, a remarkable if knife-edged honor.

“I’d like you to recap the basic issues, Portia. In your own words and in your own time, if you please.”

“Oh. Well.” Portia shook herself. Idiot! She cursed. What else could it be about? “Scott failed miserably on Moscow. Or rather, he succeeded inappropriately. The result was, well, not what we anticipated. Sixteen ubermenschen dead, not to mention the loss of an entire client world that was less than eighteen months from open phase-two restabilization — that was a major setback in its own right. Worse, the weapons tests — the causality-violation devices his puppets were testing — have probably attracted the attention of the Enemy. Bluntly, he failed on two levels; his treason against his own kind failed, and worse, the weapons tests also failed catastrophically, leading to the loss of the system. It was, all told, a disaster, and Scott knew he would attract unwelcome attention if he could not provide a compensatory positive outcome.”

“Hmmph.” Blumlein grunted, something approximating a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. On the stage behind her, three or four moppets were performing some sort of erotic dance: Portia angled her chair so that she could watch sidelong, while keeping her attention on the planetary overdepartmentsecretary. “Juggling on the tightrope over the abyss is a long and honorable tradition, I suppose.” He smiled, not unkindly. “What long-term plans did U. Scott intend to pursue?”

“I think he was going to take over New Dresden, but he didn’t leave any written records.” Portia sniffed. “Not surprising.” His attitude encouraged her to return the smile as a peer — a gamble, but one that might bring serious advancement if it paid off.

“Absolutely.” Blumlein’s expression turned chilly. “How could he possibly have been so stupid?”

She shrugged, dismissively. “Scott has — well — never lacked for self-confident ambition.” You can say that again. A brief flashback: lying in bed listening to him rant, plans to create his own clade, bring about the unborn god, steal whole worlds from the flock. “I worked closely with him for several years, when we were younger. It’s probably a good thing time ran out on him; he wasn’t keeping his eye on the fine detail, and if he’d gotten his plan past the second stage, the consequences could have been even worse than the slow-motion disaster he’s left us with.”

Blumlein put his glass down, leaned closer, his pupils dilating slightly. Portia mirrored his gestures, becoming the confidante. “Tell me what Scott was working on in that sector,” he said quietly. “And what you think you might have done with it in his stead.”

“The—” Her eyes swiveled sideways.

The overdepartmentsecretary caught her glance and nodded. “They won’t remember any of this tomorrow,” he said.

“Good. I’d hate to be responsible for spoiling such well-trained dancers.”

“I thank you for your attentiveness to my estate, but would you mind returning to the matter in hand? We don’t have all evening.” There was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there a moment before, and Portia cursed silently, nodding.

“Very well. Scott’s official task was to take over Moscow and divert it to serve the purposes of the Defense Directorate by developing munitions types forbidden to us by the Enemy. Then he was to prepare Moscow for assimilation. His agents infiltrated the government of Moscow quite effectively using only routine puppetry and a modicum of bribes. But in addition to the official project plan he paid special attention to their Defense Ministry. This paid off with the entire attack plan for the system’s deterrent force, at which point Scott started getting ambitious. He got the lot — go codes, stop codes, waypoints, and insertion vectors for every possible target — and when the Zero Incident occurred that data was safely filed away in his office.”

“Ah.” Blumlein nodded and smiled, his expression thawing. “And now.”

“Well.” She considered her next words with care. “I trust the copies of the go codes and stop codes arrived at your office satisfactorily. And Moscow itself is a nonissue, thanks to the failure of certain technological initiatives. But there’s still the issue of how to clean up after Scott’s little adventure. Not to mention the issue of how you want to deal with the leverage this situation places in your hands with respect to the neighbors.”

Blumlein nodded carefully. “In your assessment, how good was Scott’s final plan?”

“The general theory is audacious — nobody has ever done anything quite like it before — but the substance I wouldn’t touch with a pointy stick.” The words came out automatically. “He got sloppy with Moscow, sloppy enough that he left loose ends dangling. Exfiltration witnesses, basically, but it could all unravel from there if somebody with enough time and resources got their hands on the details and backtracked to find out where the bodies were coming from, or going to.”

She took a breath. “And while the basic scheme was interesting, his second-stage scheme relied too much on synchronicity — and took enormous risks. What makes it worse for us is that he’d actually begun to implement it. The moves against the Muscovite diplomatic team, for example — they’re already in progress, if not completed. We can’t tell until the telegrams come in, but my guess is that they’ll succeed, and they’ll make every chancellery within a hundred light years shit themselves. Not to mention what will happen when the High Directorate finds out. To take a whole planet for himself, then use its weapons of mass destruction to set himself up as an interplanetary emperor — it’s insanely audacious, I’ll grant you that. But his plan relied on the bystanders believing that a bunch of democrats would willingly do what he wanted. And I think it was only wishful thinking that made him contemplate such a dependency.”

“Then that brings me to my next question.” Blumlein paused for a moment, looking thoughtful, then snapped his fingers; a moppet minced forward, knelt to present a small silver box atop a velvet cushion. He took the box, flipped the lid open, and removed the inhaler within: “Dose?”

“Thank you kindly, no.”

He nodded, then bent over it for a few seconds. “Ah, that’s better.” Cold blue eyes, pinprick pupils. “The core of the matter. In the hypothetical case that I was to charge you with implementing U. Scott’s plan and carrying it to completion, for the greater good of the clade—” he sent a flickering glance in the direction of the stage, and at that moment Hoechst realized that despite every protestation of privacy, he believed the Propagators or the Arm might be watching, might have corrupted his own puppet master — “how would you go about it?”

Oh. Oh. Portia shivered, appalled by the vista of opportunities before her. This could mean her elevation to parity with Blumlein, to board level for an entire planet if she played her hand successfully. An almost sexual thrill: Then nobody could touch me! To be in control of the mechanics — she clamped down on the thought immediately, before it could form. First things first. The cost would be high, the temptation to Blumlein to have her executed before she could become a threat would be enormous …

Composing herself, she nodded slightly and picked up her glass. “I would first have to assure myself that I had the approval of the Directorate,” she began, not glancing at the stage. “Then, once I had that, I’d pursue U. Scott’s general plan, but directing events on-site in person rather than entrusting control to an extra layer of subordination. I don’t believe you can have a sufficiently tight grasp on an action if you try to exercise remote control; every level of authority you delegate adds delay and an additional risk of failure, and the plan has too many contingencies to entrust command to a junior puppeteer who lacks the big picture. And I’d divert the target of his enterprise to a, ah, more acceptable one…”